You cannot overemphasize the relevance of having a website for your church in contemporary times. As a clergyman overseeing a congregation, your church website is not only relevant to your existing congregation but also to other people who want to know more about your church. Although many churches all over the world have successfully running websites, not all of these sites have the essential features to allow for a soothing user-friendly experience for its visitors. So, we have decided to put together some key attributes you need in a typical church website. You probably have a few basics on your church website already, and that’s great, but there some features your church website must have.
Name, Contact Details And Other General Information
As basic as they seem, you need to have a phone number or an email address on the website on which people can reach you. You should make sure that your church internet site has its name distinctly positioned on the home page as well. You may want to include the denomination your church is associated with as there are churches with similar names, yet under different denominations.
People within and outside the country may also have reasons to contact you, and it’s quite essential that, in a well-connected world, they can easily do so. Provide call lines and an email address for people to reach your church on. A contact form in which they can also send enquiries directly from the website is even better.
Visitors Page
You should also provide some general information on your site, enough to enlighten a visitor on what your church is about. An ‘About us’ page would be great to cover the church’s vision, values and beliefs. Many people may have heard of your church and are interested in getting to know more. Make sure you are thinking of them when building a website and include a general description of your church.
Service Times
Not many churches do this, but this is another essential feature you should have on a church website. People should be able to view your church service times. Having a schedule of your services published on your website is especially helpful to new visitors to your church. As a church, you need to teach, and disciple people and a vital step in doing so is by letting visitors know the times and days of worship. In the event of adjustments to service times, you need to update the website to avoid any confusion.
Pictures of Your Church
Some churches do not include this on their website. It is, in fact, one that a church internet site should not be void of. You can add all the right information and branding, but when you still go ahead to upload stock images, you might diminish the originality of your site. You do not need to have a state-of-the-art facility before you put out your church pictures on the website. Those events — church meetings, teaching sessions, music ministrations — are enough to grace your website gallery. It gives your site visitors as well as intending newcomers an impression of a real community of people.
Giving and Donations
Having a section for giving and donations on your site will allow individuals living in distant locations to reach out to your church financially. You also want to make sure that your site is connected to secured payment platforms to avoid online fraud problems. More so, your website needs to have a dedicated page that explains the work your church is doing and encourages people to give towards it. It should also explain how the payment platforms work, so people get to donate with ease. This page should be brief, and the call-to-action should be as noticeable as possible. You want them to give before they exit the page. You could also link this page to online giving in your blog posts, online devotionals, and social media posts.
Ministry Pages
Virtually all churches have various ministries within them. From music ministry, drama ministry, outreaches and many more. Your church website should be a platform for people to be aware of what these ministries are doing. These pages should also include the goals of each ministry as well as contact details of the ministry leaders. You could also upload pictures of these activities on your website so visitors could always see them and maybe, give to the cause.
Blog
A blog is an excellent place for you to share your church’s teachings in different formats as well as daily devotionals to your online congregation. A website blog might not be so challenging to run. You could get some of your members who are good writers to volunteer to run the church’s website blog.
Social media integration
If your church doesn’t already have a social media presence, you should consider joining some of the more popular networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We are in a social media era, and if you’re ever going to drive good traffic to your website, you’d need to leverage these platforms well enough. Place clear buttons on the website and link to the social media pages. You could also add sharing buttons to blog posts so that people can easily share with their friends and followers.
Sermon pages
It is certainly one of the essential features of your website. It’s a simple way for many people to be involved with your church. And since your website is probably the first contact to your church for some visitors, you want to organize your sermons so well that visitors can always browse through them quickly find one that interests them.
News and events
You could also create a page on your website to update your visitors on events forthcoming or ongoing in your church. Having a page dedicated to this makes it easy to provide links for people to register for conferences, retreats and other essential meetings. These links can be further shared with their friends and families.
Like ChurchPad, your website is a tool to help your church grow and thrive. It also provides an opportunity to help serve your members and reach new people too. The above ten features on your website will make the process of spreading the gospel as well as other useful information much more accessible
With the advances in technology, there have been several innovations of simple and sophisticated tools to enable a more global church community. You can also get hold of a complete church management software like ChurchPad to utilize for maximum church growth and management needs.
